Re: New snapshot

Mike:
Some tips:
1. The bird's not sharp. If your camera allows it, choose the autofocus sensor at the bird's eye. 2. Avoid open sky as a background. Featureless blue is pretty boring, and gives no sense of place. 3. If you must shoot a darker subject in the sky, use matrix / evaluative metering if you have it, and overexpose one to 1 2/3 stop. 4. Against sky, choose a composition that avoids putting critical subject details like eyes in the shadows. 5. With Nikon or Canon dSLRs (and maybe others), cloudy white balance gives a slightly warm tone to images. Shade will be warmer still.
If your camera allows it, shoot in RAW, DNG, or NEF format. Then you can tweak white balance after the fact in Adobe Camera Raw or other raw converter.
This image shows chrominance noise from boosted shadows that were underexposed to begin with. The best way to handle this is to use the lowest ISO you can. Then expose with important shadow details no more than 1 2/3 stops below 18% gray / Zone V. If all else fails, use a noise reducer like nik DFine or Noise Ninja after you've tweaked everything else in Photoshop. 


Mark Bohrer
Wildlife Photography on the Urban Edge
www.mountain-and-desert.com


At 10:35 AM 1/24/2007, you wrote:

Two days ago a red trail hawk came and had lunch at the feeders. I
shot about 30 pix and for some reason not yet understood NONE of them
registered on the memory card?*&%#@!

The fellow came back today for a "Power(line) lunch and this time I
managed to catch him some 50 times (LOVE those digital cameras!)
 I have added one image to the Pic a week site at



http://web.mac.com/fotoyvel


If anyone wants see a few more e-mail me off list and i'll send a few
other images.

As an aside I am having a LOT of trouble with exposures... probably
my inability to determine the proper white balance... OR maybe the
metering pattern.

I seem to be getting the closest exposures using  spot metering, but
I don't like either the daylight WB or the Auto WB  and the "cloudy"
is not much better. Possibly because of the expanse of sky??? Anyway
I find the levels are way off, so the snap here has been GREATLY
tweaked for levels & brightness/contrast in PS CS.

Any help would be appreciated... I suppose i ought to master the
custom (or ion this camera "manual" )WB using a sheet of paper...

Mike

=========================================================
To Unsubscribe: Send email to leica-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field. The acknowledgment that you then receive MUST be replied to per instructions. You may also log in to the Web interface to unsubscribe. 


=========================================================
To Unsubscribe: Send email to leica-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in 
the Subject field. The acknowledgment that you then receive MUST be replied to 
per instructions. You may also log in to the Web interface to unsubscribe.

Other related posts: